Why It Is Impossible to Know Something’s True Essence

Kabbalah teaches us that reality could be divided into four layers: essence, abstract form, form clothed in matter and matter.

Our tools of perception can never perceive the Essence, regardless of our degree. Although what we perceive is indeed the Essence, we can only perceive it through Matter, and we cannot even imagine what the Essence itself is like. Moreover, we cannot even want to perceive the Essence.

For example, none of us feels that an additional sixth finger would be welcome. However, if we could imagine that we once had a sixth finger, and that we could do something with it that we cannot do today, then we could talk about a need for a sixth finger. But if we never had an additional finger, we could not even imagine how it would benefit us. This is why we will never want a sixth finger.

Similarly, since we never felt an Essence, we cannot want to perceive the Essence. Attainment of Matter, the manifestation of the actions of the Essence that is present within the Matter, is quite satisfactory.

The above discussion raises an important question: If we cannot perceive the Essence, how did Kabbalists know that it exists? For the time being, we will leave this question unanswered, but we promise to return to it later.

How Practical Experimentation Is Used In Kabbalah

The will to receive is the Matter. It is divided into five degrees. When the will to receive is integrated with the intention to bestow, it adopts different Forms, from the most opposite from the Creator to the Form of the Creator Himself. While spiritually evolving, we gradually study all the qualities that Matter might assume. This is called “Formative Learning.”

We have a genuine desire to acquire the Forms of bestowal that are dressed in Matter. A genuine desire means that it is a desire that stems from having had this Form before and not having it now.

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How Can the Spiritual Reality be Perceived?

The gist of our work is the making of the Kli. If we know how to build our tool of perception correctly, we will understand where we truly are. Our substance consists of a desire to receive delight and pleasure.

If we can make this substance sensitive to insights concerning reception and bestowal, we will be able to use it to perceive the spiritual world. It is similar to the way a block of crude iron is melted to create engine parts. When assembled correctly, they yield a working engine.

Similarly, we must work with ourselves to perceive spirituality. Building the spiritual Kli is a lot like sculpting—you must carve the raw material and file it until the desired shape appears. The raw material, in this case, consists of our desires, our thoughts, and intentions.

How a Change of Intention Enables a Person to Feel Nature

The Creator formed Creation with the intention of doing good to His creatures. To realize His goal, He created a Kli—a will to receive—that would receive His benefit. At first, this will is shapeless. Shaping the will to receive is the work of us all until it is robed in its final form—bestowal, the form of the Creator.

The substance itself remains as it was first made—a will to receive pleasure—but changing the intention to bestowal likens its modus operandi to that of the Creator. Thus, the intention is the form.

Kabbalah books depict the forms that one should create in the will to receive, degree-by-degree, to finally sense the benefits that come from the Creator. The general will to receive consists of 613 desires, and each of these is topped either by an aim to receive, or an aim to give. These forms of reception or bestowal that “cover” each desire determine one’s degree of spiritual attainment.

A degree is a certain level of strength of the Form of bestowal. This enables the benefits of the Creator to manifest within the will to receive. The diverse fillings within the will to receive are the origin of the many names of the Creator. It is the perceiving individual who names the Creator according to the flavors he or she feels within the Creator’s bestowal.

What Kabbalah Researches

Once the Kabbalists attained the nature of reality and studied it, they divided the manner of recognition of reality into four levels: Matter, Form in Matter, Abstract Form, and Essence. Kabbalah is a practical study method that leads researchers thoroughly and systematically along the evolutionary trail. As in any other scientific method, Kabbalah teaches the researcher what to do, which results are to be expected, and expounds on the reasons for them. Kabbalah does not engage in depicting theoretical states that one cannot carry out independently and with full awareness.

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Here Is a Method that Is Helping People Receive Endless Enjoyment

Kabbalah in Hebrew means “reception.” As its name testifies, Kabbalah teaches how to receive. With the right attitude towards reality, it is possible to experience endless enjoyment. This endless enjoyment is not from sex, food, a new car, a big house, or other transient, mundane pleasures. Instead, it is from those delights that can fill us with such utter bliss that we would transcend any sensation of time to receive them.

We sense the passing of time by the fluctuations between good and bad feelings, or sensations of fulfillment and absence of fulfillment. However, when we are in a state of elation, we are unaware of time. The wisdom of Kabbalah tells us that we can eliminate time altogether, along with the sensation of distance and any other limits or boundaries. One who has reached such a state is clearly living in an infinite, unlimited world.

Our lives will always contain two opposing elements—pleasure and desire, plus and minus. A pleasure that pervades a desire satiates it and cancels it. We come across this phenomenon in every area of life. When the plus neutralizes the minus, we end up feeling nothing at all. As long as we short-circuit pleasure and desire, we will be locked in a zero-sum equation. However, put a resistor between these opposites and they will work perfectly, creating everlasting enjoyment.

How Giving Is Possible through Receiving

Kabbalists explain that pleasure stems from the Upper Force. This Force sends us pleasure because It loves us. When we try to receive the pleasure directly, the pleasure cancels our desire to enjoy it and the pleasure stops.

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Now You Can Understand What the Bible Is Really About

Kabbalists, as previously mentioned, research the Upper World, the world beyond the perception of an ordinary person. Hence, the depictions of Kabbalists’ attainments relate to the Upper World, but because we are not aware of the existence of a spiritual world besides our own, we ascribe their words to our world, a phenomenon called “materialization.”

When the Torah (Five Books of Moses) was written, the people of Israel were at a spiritual degree. But after two thousand years of detachment from spirituality since the ruin of the Second Temple, the Torah stories seem to refer to historic episodes or moral conduct.

Yet, this is not the case. Each element in the world is connected to the same element in all the other worlds by a “root and branch” connection. Based on that principle, Kabbalists developed a language that relies on the parallelism between the Upper Worlds and our own world. In it, processes unfolding in the spiritual world are described using names of branches taken from our world.

Introducing the 4 Languages of Kabbalah

Kabbalists use four different languages to explain how we can reach the degree of the Creator and how we can draw to ourselves the Correcting Force that will invert our nature from egoism to altruism. These languages are the language of the Bible, the language of laws, the language of legends, and the language of Kabbalah.

In his essay, The Wisdom of Kabbalah and its Essence, Baal HaSulam wrote that there are four languages in the wisdom of truth, and the essence of the wisdom of Kabbalah is no different than the essence of the Bible. However, the laws, the legends, and the language of Kabbalah are the most convenient and appropriate to use.

The difference among the languages is in their accuracy. The language of Kabbalah is more precise in depicting the connection between the root in the Upper World and the branch in the lower world. The more accurately one connects oneself to one’s Upper Root, the greater Correcting Force one receives.

What Is the Best Kabbalah Book for People Living Today?

The language of Kabbalah applies to terms that do not exist in our world, such as “worlds” and “Sefirot,” charts and formulae. This language makes it easier to avoid confusion and materialization, and facilitates a clear and ordered approach to the study. The language of Kabbalah is essentially different from other languages because of the clear, unequivocal way it describes the purpose of Creation—the similarity of the creature to the Creator, i.e. inversion of egoism into altruism.

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Why the Spiritual Reality Is Hidden

Throughout Its Existence, humanity has been utilizing its five senses to research the reality in which it lives, and gather the findings to formulate sciences. The purpose of science and the accumulated human knowledge is to improve our lives and help us more effectively use the world we live in.

The wisdom of Kabbalah, unlike all other sciences, researches a realm whose existence eludes an ordinary person. To research this realm, one must be equipped with another sense, a sense that perceives the “Upper World.” With this additional sensory ability, one can gather information about the Upper World and experiment with it. Like any ordinary scientist, a Kabbalist can record reactions to actions. Kabbalists are researchers of the Upper World, and as such, they have recorded their findings over thousands of years of research. The collection of their records constitutes the wisdom of Kabbalah.

What Kinds of Tools Does Kabbalah Give a Person?

The wisdom of Kabbalah describes the actions that originate in the Creator and hang down to our world through all the Upper Worlds. It also describes how they expand through the corporeal reality that we can all perceive with our five ordinary senses.

Our world is a consequence of the Upper Worlds. Thus, the wisdom of Kabbalah contains knowledge about the Upper Worlds and our world. The Upper Worlds pertain to a higher level of existence than our world, where time, space, and motion do not exist, but only abstract forces. It follows that Kabbalah contains the existence of all times as they are expressed in our world.

Kabbalah is a means to help us research all the states of existence. This sequence of states includes our state before our souls dress in physical bodies, all our phases while we exist in this world, and our situation once the soul departs from the body and returns to its root in the Upper World.

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